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ed an LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD 
Oxford University Pree 


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Gutenberg to Plan 


An Outline of 


The Early History of “Printing 


BY 


GEORGE PARKER WINSHIP 


LIBRARIAN OF THE HARRY ELKINS WIDENER COLLECTION 
HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY 










= 


CAMBRIDGE 


HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


1926 


COPYRIGHT, 1926 
BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., U.S.A. 


Preface 


| ee study of the early history of printing has 
entered upon a new phase since the World 
War. It is a double phase, divided by the year 1500. 
The accumulated information of all that happened 
before that date is being codrdinated, but the re- 
sults must be held as tentative until the completion 
of a new catalogue of fifteenth-century books. For 
the sixteenth century, a beginning has been made, 
_but nothing more, toward bringing together widely 
scattered data. 

A hundred years ago, Ludwig Hain made it pos- 
sible to study fifteenth-century books intelligently, 
by printing descriptions of 16,300 titles known to 
him. Half a century later, Henry Bradshaw showed 
that the proper way to classify these titles, in order 
to get at the hidden story of printing, is to group 
the books from each press in their chronological 
order. Robert Proctor, in the eighteen-nineties, ap- 
plied this method to the “Fifteeners”’ in the British 
Museum and Bodleian libraries, locating with bril- 
liant intuition nearly half of the total number that 
were published without any name of place or of 
printer, or date. Proctor’s work revealed for the 
first time the details of how printing spread over 
Europe. It made possible the systematic classifica- 


Inve 


tion of existing data, and it stimulated the search 
for documentary material by which to test the in- 
ferences derived from the internal evidence of the 
books themselves. 

A somewhat chaotic mass of information accu- 
mulated in widely scattered places, too large for 
easy assimilation and at the same time insufficient 
in most cases for certainty in deductions. The prob- 
lems involved in the effort to understand just how 
the earliest typographers worked, and what they 
accomplished, became clearer as the difficulties in- 
creased of reaching satisfactory answers. 

The accumulated information lay fallow through 
the four years of war. When the study of the ma- 
terial was taken up again, about five years ago, with 
minds freshened and freed of many old assump- 
tions, more definite ideas and surer deductions be- 
came possible. These ideas and deductions are still 
far from certainties, for they have not been sub- 
jected to the critical reéxamination which every at- 
tempt to reconstruct the past requires. 

This outline aims to be a statement of facts which 
have in most cases long been established, with as 
much of the newer conclusions drawn from these 
facts as seems to the author reasonably certain of 
eventual acceptance. Controversial details have 
usually been ignored, because any discussion of pros 
and cons, or even an intelligible statement of the 
points at issue, would destroy the proportion of the 


[vi] 


narrative by giving these subjects more space than 
they deserve. 

Another reason for ignoring controversies about 
fifteenth-century matters is the appearance of the 
first volume of the “Gesamtkatalog der Wiegen- 
drucke,” prepared by a commission appointed by 
the German government in 1904. This work will 
take the place of Hain, which has held the field un- 
challenged for a century. The first volume contains 
half as many more titles than Hain. The new entries 
are those of less familiar works, frequently in the 
vernacular languages, and are from every point of 
view more significant to the student than the publi- 
cations in Latin, of a religious character, which bulk 
so largely in lists of Incunabula. The corresponding 
portion of Hain is a little over one twentieth of the 
whole number of entries, so that the estimate of ten 
years before the new “ Gesamtkatalog”’ will be com- 
pleted seems conservative. But until it is finished 
and the necessary indices of places and printers ap- 
pear, every statement about the first half century of 
printing must be held as subject to revision as soon 
as the definitive data become available for study. 

Fifteenth-century books have been a subject for 
studious attention for more than two hundred 
years. Nothing comprehensive or systematic has yet 
been done for those of the sixteenth century. The 
Bibliographical Society has listed English books 
to 1640, and the British Museum has printed the 


[vu] 


Spanish and French sections of what it is hoped will 
be a catalogue of its books dated before 1601. Other 
works are listed by J. B. Childs in “A Bibliography 
of Literature describing Books printed between 
1501 and 1601,” issued by the Bibliographical So- 
ciety of America in 1923. A foundation for further 
study was laid by D. B. Updike in his “Printing 
Types,” 1922, with its discriminating comments on 
the characteristic work of each country. 

Alfred W. Pollard, long of the British Museum, is 
responsible for most of the statements in this out- 
line, particularly for the method by which I reached 
conclusions in a few cases radically different from 
his. I have, with his permission, repeated in a few 
cases his phrasing of certain statements, without 
quotation marks, because I cannot express these 
things as accurately and convincingly as he has 
done. My interest in fine books began when I first 
came upon a book written by him, and it has grown 
as Our acquaintance ripened into friendship. 

I am indebted also to the Club of Odd Volumes, 
for this is an elaboration of its “Catalogue of an 
Exhibition Illustrating the Varied Interests of Book 
Lovers, 1450-1600,” held at its club house in Boston 
during March, 1922. 


GEORGE PARKER WINSHIP 


Harry E.xins WIDENER 
Memoria LIBRARY 


Contents 


THe InvENTION oF TYPOGRAPHY, 1440-1456 ..... 


THE PEriop oF DEVELOPMENT, 1460-1480 . 

THE SPREAD OF PRINTING THROUGHOUT GERMANY 

Tue ESTABLISHING OF PRINTING AS A BUSINESS . 

THE PRINTERS ENCOUNTER THE RENAISSANCE 

VENICE BECOMES THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE Book 
TRADE 

PRINTING REACHES THE WHOLE EvropeAN WorLD 

THE First Private PRESSEs . 

Tue Use or PIcTureEs 

THe Decape or Picture Books . 

THE LEARNED PRINTERS . 

Tue Patrons or PRINTING 

ConFLICTING TENDENCIES AT Paris AND GENEVA 

‘THE ENp oF THE ManuscripT TRADITION .... 


Tue Enp or THE Era or THE Master PRINTERS 





List of Illustrations 


THe INTERIOR OF A PRINTING OFFICE 
Designed by Joannes Stradanus, engraved by Philippus Gallaeus, 
and published at Antwerp about 1600. Reduced from an article 
by Falconer Madan on “Early Representations of the Printing- 
Press,” in Bibliographica, Part II, 1894. 

THE ANCHOR AND DOLPHIN 
Reduced. From the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Sa ey Aldus 

at Venice in 1499. Three years later, Aldus adopted this as his 
printer’s mark. 

THE COLOPHON OF THE CATHOLIcON, Mainz, 1460 
Unless otherwise stated in this list, the illustrations are the same 
size as the original. 

A PorTION OF THE PRINTED INDULGENCE DATED 1454 
The line containing the name of the man and his wife to whom it 
was issued, and the place, Cologne, were written by hand. It was 
presumably printed at Mainz. 

THE COLOPHON OF THE 1462 BIBLE 
Printed by Fust and Schoeffer. In the original this was in a 
THE CLosincG LINES OF THE APOCALYPSE OR REVELATION 

From the Thirty-six-line Bible. The Explicit was added by hand. 

THE SAME PassAGE FROM REVELATION . 

From the Forty-two-line Bible. 

THe Tower or Base. Mao 
From the Liber Chronicarum SS at PNcron bers in 1493. 
Much reduced. 

LINES FROM CICERO DE ORATORE 
Printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Subiiee in nen 

A PorTION OF THE TEXT OF LACTANTIUS, OPERA . 
Printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz at Rome in 1470. 


[xi] 


Io 


12 


13 


22 


25 


CHAPTER HEADING 


From the edition of Eusebius, ‘De Fennnehen Dreepareine 
printed by Jenson at Venice in 1470. An initial S, not reproduced, 
was added by hand. 


VENETIAN BorDER AND INITIAL LETTER. 


From the first page of Celsus Maffeus, Oratio pro Turcorum ex- 
pugnatione, printed by Ratdolt at Venice in 1478. Reduced. 


Noau’s ARK 


From the Bible in Geen: aise a Koberger: at Noe bere 
in 1483. 


FLORENTINE BORDER 
From Uberto e Philomena, Satan at Bireies ee 1490. 


A FIFTEENTH-CENTURY STRIKE 


From Brant’s Stultifera Navis, printed by Beninenn fe Olpe a at 
Basle in 1497. 


VIRGIL AND DANTE CROSSING THE STYX. 


From an edition of the Divina Commedia printed by Peas 
Cremonense at Venice in 1491. 


RAPPRESENTAZIONE DE SANTA ORSOLA . 


From an edition reprinted at Florence in 1554. It shoes the King 
of England instructing the ambassador whom he is sending to de- 
mand the hand of the fair Ursula, and also the Embassy on its way. 


SAVONAROLA PREACHING 
From his Compendio di Revelatione, Pe fae Biers Pace ie 
Pescia at Florence in 1496. 


A Pace or AtpineE ITatics 
From Petrarch’s Sonetti et Canzoni tated Aldus, Ven I Pas 


PRINTER'S MARK DESIGNED BY GEOFROY TORY FOR 
SIMON DE COLINES 


THE ADORATION OF THE MacI 
From Tory’s Horae B. V. Mariae, printed at Pee in I eae: 


ONE OF THE PRINTER’Ss MARKS USED BY CHRISTOPHE 
PLANTIN AT ANTWERP . 


7 


35 


47 


49 


50 


52 


54 


55 


65 


78 
79 


86 


AN OUTLINE OF 
THE HISTORY OF PRINTING 
1450-1600 


mas * 







ita vna Jeripta mille pag 


Linunt 


a: 


IMPRESSIO LIBRORVM. 


vox capt aure p 


Hi it is i 
n Huth if iu 


<4 


Potef? vt vma 


NN ! 





THE INVENTION OF TYPOGRAPHY 
1440-1456 


| hss GUTENBERG arene pe before 


the middle of the fifteenth centu - Type rap Y 
is a more correct term, for wh bt he did was to 
construct the apparatus for making movable m»tal 
letters or type and for using these to produce many 


copies, all alike, of a book. | 
Gutenberg was a native of Mainz, whose youth. 
ful activity in local politics led to hie retirement to 
Strassburg, where his experimental work on the in- 
vention was done. There, according to the testi- 
mony of witnesses in a lawsuit in 1439, Gutenbetg 
produced something, the precise character of which 
he kept secret, but which he was able to sell. Ten 
years later a Mainz banker, Johann Fust, became 
interested in the invention and provided money to 
pay for the paper, wages, and other things required 
to produce copies of a large Bible. This was com- 
pleted before August 15, 1456, for on that date the 


[32 


vicar of one of the nearby churches wrote a note at 
the end of one of these copies, which is now in the 
Bibliothéque Nationale, to record the fact that he 
had finished rubricating and binding the whole work. 

This is known as the GUTENBERG, the Mazarin, 
or the Forry-Two-LinE BiB Le, from the printer, 
the owner of the copy which was recognized as 
being the First Printep Book, or the number of 
lines on a page. The number of lines is a usual means 
of identifying early books when, as in this case, 
there is no printed name of place or printer, or date. 
This Bible consists of 641 leaves (or twice that num- 
ber of pages), 165 by 12 inches, bound in two vol- 
umes. Forty-one copies, more or less complete, are 
still to be seen, according to a “Catalogue raisonné 
des premiéres impressions de Mayence,” compiled 
in tg11 by Seymour de Ricci for the Gutenberg 
Gesellschafft. Eight of these are now in American 
public or privete libraries. 

Prrer SCHOEFFER, who became the most skilful 
printer of that century, may have been employed 
by Gutenberg, perhaps as the foreman of the shop, 
while the B:ble was printing; it is equally likely that 
it was his executive capacity —a quality the in- 
ventor lacked — which brought to completion the 
great undertaking. This involved the management 
of six presses, of which two or three were in use for 
nearly the full period from 1450 to 1456, each with 
its crew of two or three workmen besides the com- 


[4] 


positor who set the type for the page which was to 
be printed next. In a well-organized shop there 
would also be type-casters to maintain a supply of 
letters, and workmen to look after a regular supply 
of blank paper and the proper drying and storage of 
the printed sheets. Someone, possibly a local ec- 
clesiastic, must have made certain that the text was 
correct after it was set in type. Presumably a bind- 
ery was added to the other activities after the first 
half of the book was finished. 

Jouann Fust, on November 6, 1455, established 
by legal proceedings that he had advanced money 
to Gutenberg five years earlier. This undoubtedly 
shows when the work began, and also when it was 
approaching completion. Two years later the type 
used for printing the Bible was in Fust’s possession, 
and he also had copies of the book for sale. Guten- 
berg’s name at about the same time is entered on a 
record for non-payment of interest on other debts 
of long standing. In 1465 the inventor was pen- 
sioned by the Archbishop Adolph of Mainz on ac- 
count of the service which he had rendered. When 
he died, at the beginning of 1468, a Dr. Homery 
laid claim to the type and other apparatus that he 
had been using. 

The only book, except the forty-two-line Bible, 
which can be connected with Gutenberg 1s the 
CaTHOLIcoN, an encyclopaedic dictionary com- 
piled in the thirteenth century by Joannes Balbus, 


[5 


Altifimi prefioio cuius nutu mfantium linaue fi 
une Orferte.Qun oy micfope puulis renelat quod 
fapientibus celat. Dic liber eareains. atholicn. 
onice mearnaaonis anny OD ece Ix Alma m ur 
be magintina nacionis mclite germanice.Qunam 
vei demenda tim alro mavnit [umine.donod oy F 
tuiro.ccteris terran nacionibus prefer. illyfrare 
Q3 dignatus eft ston calami.frili-aut penne fulfra 
go. mira patronax Formay of Concordia spor 
Gone et modulo.impreffiis arg; confeetus eft. 
Dine tibs fancte pater nato ci Aamime facro.Laus 
et bono? One trino eribuan o-uno Ccclefie law 
ee libro hoe eatholice plasvaz.Qui laudare pram 
femper non inque manam OCO.GRACIAS 


CoLOPHON OF THE CATHOLICON. 1460 


of 373 leaves as large as the Bible. At the end is the 
colophon or maker’s statement upon completing the 
work, declaring that it was produced at Mainz in 
1460 “by the help of the Most High . . . who oft- 
times reveals to the lowly that which he hides from 
the wise.’’ The convincing reason for believing that 
Gutenberg printed this work, and that no one else 
can have done it, is that these words might well 
have been written by an inventor who, despite his 
invention, remained profoundly unsuccessful, and 
that it is hard to see their appropriateness to any- 
one else. 

The type with which the Catholicon was printed 
was much smaller than that used for the forty-two- 
line Bible, twenty lines of the latter measuring 140 


[6] 


erint Jndulgentia acplenaria remiffione feel in vite 
e06 facta fi fupuixerintant-p eon beredes ft tic trafic 
ada alia di¢ teiunet-legittimo impedimeto ecclefte po 
166 111 Diko Ano uel cius parte-anno fequeti uel alias ¢ 
(nits COMod? Adimplere nequimcrit Confeffor ad idele) 
0 tiex sfidentia remni/fionic hindi g abfit peccarensd 
retiffio quo ad prea ex afrdentiaut prnittique oes 
ovassly £¢ fr dvr cw Vee a <3 
to buitsfinodi indulgentije gaudere debet-Jn verritar 
Dats oles — AnnodiiiGdeeceliiitpie vero 


FRoM THE INDULGENCE DATED 1454 


millimeters and twenty of the Catholicon type, 82 
mm. Types of just about the same size, however 
(20 lines, 90 mm.), had been used some years earlier 
for printing broadside Indulgences which were is- 
sued in 1454 and 1455 to those who gave money to 
help the war against the Turks. 

Another fact connected with the Bible shows that 
the effort to reduce the cost of printing goes back to 
its very beginning. Some copies of the Bible have 
only 40 lines on the first ten pages, followed by a 
page with 41 lines. Careful examination proves that 
the saving made by getting 42 lines into the space 
planned for 40, was accomplished by filing off the 
upper and lower sides of the body or base of the 
metal type, so that there was less white between 
each two lines. As soon as the saving in the cost of 
the paper, amounting to nearly five per cent, or 30 
leaves for each copy, was shown to be practicable, 


te et 


the moulds were readjusted for the smaller body, 
and the type for the remainder of the book was cast 
on this size. 

The reasonable inference from the facts in the 
preceding paragraphs seems to be that, as soon as 
work on the Bible began, Gutenberg introduced at 
least two changes which lessened the cost. He would 
presumably have continued to make other altera- 
tions in the appearance of the book, as new ideas 
came to him, if someone had not interfered to pre- 
vent this. As the Bible was completed without fur- 
ther change, it is not unlikely that Fust, who pro- 
vided the money and was interested in getting a 
salable product as soon as possible, did interfere by 
placing in charge someone whom he could trust to 
carry the undertaking through. If he did this, it is 
also likely that the inventor — prevented from try- 
ing experiments which would interrupt the pro- 
gress of work on the Bible — spent his time devis- 
ing means for making even smaller type and still 
cheaper books. Such a type was used for the Indul- 
gences of 1454, and in a perfected form for the 
Catholicon of 1460. 

Schoeffer became the son-in-law of Fust, and 
after the latter’s death in 1466 carried on the busi- 
ness until 1502. 


THE PERIOD OF DEVELOPMENT 
1460-1480 


THE second book, and the first from the firm of 
Fust & ScHOEFFER, was a magnificent Psalter of 
175 leaves, the size of the Bible, and dated 1457. 
The extraordinary mechanical skill of the craftsmen 
who developed the art of printing, within the dec- 
ade following the application of the invention to a 
large undertaking, is shown by the intricate wood- 
cut initial capitals with which they decorated this 
Psalter. These were evidently designed to prove 
that the new method of book-making could sup- 
plant the work of the illuminators as well as that of 
the scribes, for they were printed or stamped in red 
and blue, the two colors registering so accurately 
that typographic experts have been unable to agree 
just how the work was done. These capitals were 
used again in a second edition of the Psalter, two 
years later; but the obvious difficulties must have 
made the work expensive, and there were no further 
experiments of the same sort after this year. 

Fust and Schoeffer signed and dated their work 
in the colophon at the end, stating that the Psalter 
was produced “‘by an ingenious invention of print- 
ing or stamping without any driving of the pen, and 
to the worship of God has been diligently brought 


to completion by Johann Fust, a citizen of Mainz, 


C9] 


and Peter Schoeffer of Gernsheim, in the year of the 
Lord 1457, on the vigil of the Feast of the Assump- 
tion’’ (August 14). Similar statements appeared at 
the end of nearly all the books they put out, prais- 
ing in varying phrases the newly perfected method 
by which the books were made. The statements in 
these colophons are convincing evidence that this 
first printing firm had no intention of trying to sell 
its productions to unsuspecting buyers as manu- 
script books. 

The Bible was printed again by Fust and Schoef- 
fer, in 1462, in a smaller type than that of the forty- 
two-line edition (20 lines measuring 118 mm.), the 
text occupying 481 leaves. Below the colophon of 
this Bible they added a cut of their coats of arms. 
This was the first use of a printer’s mark, or device. 


Pfis boc opufculus fimeu ac copleti-et ad 
eafebia3 dcr induftne in cutate Dagunty 
por Jobanne fult cue-et fyetru fchoittser de 
gernPlepm cleric dioteh ciufdes ft confit 
matu. Anno incarnacois Since M\ecee-Acy- 
nvigilia aflumpoois gtofewirgans mane. 


, 






The idea is an obvious extension of the use of a sign 
to mark a shop, and it is not unlikely that these 
joined armorial shields hung over the door of the 
printing house. Nothing analogous to this use of a 
device, however, had been characteristic of the 
manuscript books; so that this firm may be credited 
with introducing a practice which has ever since 
persisted among printers and publishers, of using a 
distinctive mark as part of their imprint. 

Jouann MEnTELIN of Strassburg, and his son-in- 
law, ADo.tF Ruscu, were the first rivals of Fust and 
Schoeffer. Gutenberg had lived at Strassburg from 
about 1430 until shortly before 1448. There is a 
technical crudeness about much of the work of 
Mentelin and Rusch which suggests that they may 
have acquired their knowledge of how to print be- 
fore the details of the invention had been perfected. 
Only four of the 58 books ascribed to these two, on 
the evidence of the type faces, are dated, and only a 
few others have the name of either place or printer. 
These signs of secretiveness suggest some connec- 
tion with the time when the inventor would natur- 
ally desire to keep everything as much as possible 
to himself. 

A few fragments survive which may be speci- 
mens of Gutenberg’s early experimental work. The 
most convincing of these is a portion of an astro- 
logical calendar, which gives certain data that cor- 
respond with the astronomical calculations for the 


oat 


year 1448. This is the year in which the inventor 
is thought to have returned to Mainz, having per- 
fected the details sufficiently to enable him to in- 
terest a financier in the possibilities of what he was 
doing. Other fragments in differing types of the 
same general character contain portions of the text 
of Aelius Donatus “On the Parts of Speech,” which 
was at that time the most widely used elementary 
school-book — just the sort of book for which there 
would be a ready sale to uncritical buyers interested 
only in cheapness. 

Another early type, closely related to that of 
the Calendar fragment, was used in printing the 
THIRTY-SIX-LINE BrBLeE. The difference between 36 
and 42 represents the extent to which the type was 
reduced and refined, in the effort to lessen the size, 
and the cost, of the work, when the First Bible was 
undertaken. The thirty-six-line Bible, although it 
is in an earlier type, was printed after the other 


ta lucinlibro tio - Dirie q rel 
montium peeviber iftorum-Ett 
am: Deno rico amen Dnt to 
mune whelu-Oratia domi na 
eet ihpeCes ceil cum orb; uo- 
bis amen Heplitt Ayporalip 


fies (Amer — 7 


Bible, and not completed until about 1460. It is a 
very puzzling book, and almost nothing that is cer- 
tain has been found out in regard to it. It appears to 
have been the work of someone whose resources 
were limited, and who was trying to take advan- 
tage of the labors of those who had the help of Fust’s 
money. Its chief significance lies in the fact that its 
existence proves that by the time the First Bible 
was finished, the knowledge of how to print had 
passed out of the control of those who used this 
knowledge with the inventor’s consent. Printing 
had become public property. Schoeffer developed 
the only effective monopoly, that of superior work- 
manship. 

The thirty-six-line Bible may have been printed 
at BAMBERG, for ALBRECHT PFISTER used this type 
there in 1461 and 1462 for the first books printed 
in the German language and the first that have 
survived which were illustrated with pictures. 


pta fire in libra ifto . Minit qui te- 
fimonium pehiber ittorum . Lam. 
Venig nto amet. Vent Domine the 
fu. Orata dnt net pelts cai cu orm 
bs uobis ame QGeplicit ibapy 


THE END OF THE ForRTY-TWO-LINE BIBLE 


Showing the same text as that from the Thirty-six-line Bible on the opposite page. 
In both, the explicit was added in manuscript, and 1s not part of the printed work. 


Eee 


Co.Locn_ was the next place to utilize the inven- 
tion. Its University provided purchasers eager to 
secure cheaper books. The demand was for small 
works containing the required reading on which the 
professors lectured. These texts were reprinted over 
and over again in almost identical form and type, 
making the study of the editions particularly diffi- 
cult. There are books from at least nine fifteenth- 
century Cologne presses, nearly a third of the total 
number, which can be distinguished by their use of 
very slightly differing types, but are without other 
means of identification. The most plausible expla- 
nation is that the printing business developed into 
something of a cottage industry, anyone who could 
buy or borrow a little type and rig a press being 
able to make a living by catering to the student 
demand. The fact that most of the Cologne books 
were of quarto size, averaging about $4 by 73 inches, 
and frequently of not over 16 or 24 pages, shows 
that the printers needed only a little capital to 
carry on a business. The size of these books should 
- be kept in mind in comparing the large number of 
recorded titles of Cologne fifteenth-century books 
—over 1400 — with the Mainz record of 200 or 
Strassburg’s 1000. The latter cities specialized on 
bulky legal and ecclesiastical folios containing the 
canon law and the mediaeval classics, so that the 
actual amount of work done was greater than at 
Cologne, despite the latter’s larger figure. 


[14] 


THE SPREAD OF PRINTING THROUGHOUT 
GERMANY 


THERE were three establishments capable of turn- 
ing out a large book, and in all probability also an 
uncertain number of smaller shops engaged in print- 
ing, before 1462, when the city of Mainz was thrown 
into turmoil by the struggles of rival claimants to 
the archiepiscopal power. Fust and Schoeffer saw in 
this an opportunity to develop a new line of profit- 
able activity. Two of the principal resources of the 
industry began at this time, the printing of news 
and of official business. In 1461 and 1462 both of 
these took the form of large broadsides, the printed 
matter occupying one side of a full sheet of the ordi- 
nary paper of the time, approximately 12 by 16 
inches. Ten of these broadsides are now known, 
but undoubtedly others were printed which have 
entirely disappeared. They contained proclama- 
tions, announcements, and information published 
by direction of the successful archbishop, Adolph 
of Nassau, or on behalf of the deposed rival. 

The troubles which culminated in the sacking of 
Mainz by the victorious soldiery in 1462 added to 
the prosperity of the local printers, as in all later 
wars. It is, however, also probable that during the 
confusion some of Gutenberg’s workmen left him, to | 
try their fortunes elsewhere. The general spread of 
printing to other towns is ordinarily dated from 


Lis] 


this year. Eltville was the next place at which a press 
was set up, and Basle followed by 1467. At least 
five German printers had found their way to Italy 
before another northern city welcomed the new art. 
The way the craftsmen made their way through the 
German-speaking states can be traced by the earli- 
est dates which have been found in extant volumes. 
Augsburg had a book in 1468; Nuremberg and 
Beromiinster in 1470; Speier in 1471; Esslingen in 
1472; Ulm, Lauingen, Buda Pesth, and Merseburg 
in 1473; Marienthal, Cracow, and Liibeck in 1474; 
Breslau, Blaubeuren, Burgdorf and Trent in 1475; 
Rostock and Pilsen in 1476; Reichenstein in 14773 
Prague, Urach, Reutlingen, Geneva, and Schussen- 
ried in 1478; Wiirzburg and Erfurt in 1479; Mag- 
deburg, Zurich, and Memmingen in 1480. There 
was printing in 27 or 28 other places before the end 
of the century. 

The itinerant craftsmen to whom the spread of 
this knowledge was mainly due divide into two 
groups — those who established a permanent busi- 
ness in a large community, and those who produced 
only one or two books in a small place, ordinarily 
for a local ecclesiastic, and then moved elsewhere. 
All that a wandering printer needed to carry with 
him was the hand mould in which he could cast the 
type. He did not take the type itself, nor the ma- 
trices from which the face of the type was cast, be- 
cause for the first twenty-five years of typography 


[16 J 


the printers used different type-faces each time a 
new press was organized. The reason for this was 
that each district, and often each locality, had its 
individual scribal peculiarities, and when printing 
was winning a place for itself, the fundamental aim 
was to produce books which would be indistinguish- 
able in general appearance from other books with 
which the customers were familiar. There was no- 
thing improper in this, nor any desire to pretend 
that the new things were anything other than a 
cheaper mechanical substitute which was just as 
good as the more costly hand-written book. 

The wanderer followed his chosen road until he 
came to a monastery or other house whose head de- 
sired to have a book made by the new method. 
There the printer settled himself to fashion his ma- 
trices as closely as practicable like the letters in the 
copy of the book given him to reproduce. While he 
was doing this, the lead metal for the casting would 
be procured, and a sufficient quantity of paper or- 
dered. Most localities could probably supply a large 
wooden screw, and if not, one could be made, and 
with this in hand, the simple press was not difficult 
to put together. The compounding of a suitable ink 
was one of the important secrets of the trade, but 
the ingredients should have been ordinarily pro- 
curable. All this must have taken considerable time 
— two years is one estimate of the time that had to 
be allowed to get a new printing shop to the point of 


ge] 


producing a book. Even in those leisurely days the 
initial enthusiasm for the novel undertaking must 
often have waned as the months dragged on and the 
preliminary expenditures multiplied. Of these last, 
the largest outlay was for paper, which is figured to 
have amounted to about half the total cost of a fif- 
teenth-century book. Nearly all of these itinerant 
printers who are known because they produced a 
single book in a small place, are never heard of 
again; and it is a fair assumption that, after their 
one venture in independence, they returned to the 
ranks of the employed in some established shop. 
At Augsburg the guild of wood-engravers had a 
dominating control of local affairs, and they feared 
that the new invention would interfere with their 
prosperity. It was only through the intervention of 
the local prelate that Gunther Zainer was allowed 
to set up a press in that city. The agreement pro- 
vided that the printer should employ the engravers 
to illustrate his books. The result of this was that 
Augsburg long continued to be a centre for the pub- 
lishing of popular vernacular literature and for illus- 
trated editions of Latin works. The pictures in the 
Augsburg Bibles are among the notable examples of 
German designing and wood-engraving of the later 
fifteenth century. The book-buyers and readers of 
that time appreciated these books as much as their 
successors do at the present day, with the result that 
they are now as scarce as they are entertaining. 


THE ESTABLISHING OF PRINTING 
AS A BUSINESS 


Tue year 1480 marked the change from the period 
when each printer did everything for himself, to 
that in which specialization began and the initial 
steps were taken toward differentiation into organ- 
ized industries. Adolph Rusch of Strassburg was a 
leader in this tendency, probably realizing that he 
was a very poor printer but a good business man. 
He developed a trade in supplying paper for other 
printers, and entered into a contract for printing a 
portion of a Bible which Koberger of Nuremberg 
had undertaken. Some of the Rhine Valley crafts- 
men had apparently begun to specialize as type- 
founders. This led to greater uniformity in the 
characters, a long step toward monotony and stan- 
dardization. The same tendency is seen in the dis- 
covery, made about this time, that labor could be 
saved, whenever a commentary was placed along- 
side or all around the text, by using a type for notes 
which was exactly half the size of the text type. 
Anton Kosercer of Nuremberg became the 
first wholesale printer or publisher on a large scale. 
During the preceding quarter-century, the printer 
was ordinarily also a retailer, having a bookstore in 
the front of his house or shop. There he sold the 


works he printed, as well as others which he secured 
[19] 


by exchanging his productions for those from the 
presses of rival printers living in the same or nearby 
towns. The exchange was usually made on the 
simple basis of relative numbers of sheets, one book 
of 48 leaves (12 sheets of 4 leaves each) being reck- 
oned the equivalent of three copies of a book of 16 
leaves. The distance between the places where such 
exchanges were made rapidly increased, correspond- 
ingly enlarging the variety of each bookseller’s 
stock. This was facilitated by the steady improve- 
ment in means of transportation — the smoothing 
of main highways, the widening of bridle paths into 
roads, and the making of lighter carts with smaller 
wheels, being among the more significant changes 
in northern Europe which went on throughout the 
fifteenth century. 

Koberger led the movement from exchanges to 
sales over a wide area. Starting in 1472, by 1480 he 
was doing more business than his own establish- 
ment could handle. He employed Rusch to print, or 
to get printed, a portion of a monumental Bible 
with elaborate Commentary by Nicolas de Lyra, 
the whole work making either five or seven volumes, 
this depending upon how it was divided for binding. 
Rusch in turn had to hire additional type from 
Basle. The Basle printer, Jonann or AMERBACH, 
was just starting on a long and prosperous career, 
but already his resources justified him in thinking 
of issuing a rival edition of this de Lyra Bible. 


[ 20 ] 


Rusch heard of this plan and wrote to Amerbach a 
letter explaining Koberger’s difficulties in carrying 
the financial load, and revealing the fact that Rusch 
had himself printed and sold additional copies of 
his portion of the work in order to raise the ready 
money to pay his workmen. 

The NuremMperc CHRONICLE was Koberger’s 
most successful venture. It is one of the widely 
known books of all time. No single edition of any 
other work — this has not been reprinted since it 
appeared at Nuremberg in 1493, 1n two issues, with 
the text in Latin or in German — has been so unin- 
terruptedly in demand. The number of copies that 
were printed must have been very large, probably 
more than a thousand, the usual maximum of that 
period. Over 200 copies are owned 1n America 400 
years later, and copies can usually be found in 
the stock of the principal second-hand booksellers. 
Koberger had several private partners in this en- 
terprise, and when an effort was made in 1509 to 
close the account, there were outstanding copies 
on sale at Paris, Strassburg, Prague, Gratz, Ofen, 
Milan, and Como; as well as unsettled accounts with 
correspondents in Vienna, Passau, Basle, Lubeck, 
Ingoldstadt, Dantzig, and Franckfurt am Main. 
Returns had been received from Breslau, Posen, 
Bamberg, Cracow, Lyons, Bologna, Venice, Flor- 
ence, and Genoa. More than s00 copies had gone 


to Italy. 
e2re] 

















of 


ASS SS , 
Pat Bes 
Salon 


RES in 












Ke 


SN 
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rhinaitanvea 











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es Upes 
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f} WY, 


Dy) 


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0 084 


The Nuremberg Chronicle is a history 
the world compiled by Dr. Hartmann 


Schedel. It was elaborately illustrated with 
woodcuts executed by two of the partners 


the venture, Michael Wohlgemuth and 


his step-son, Wilhelm Pleydendorff. The 
best count of these illustrations gives 1809 
impressions from 645 different blocks. The 
important cities were represented by care- 
fully drawn pictures occupying one or two 
full pages, and each showing all the char- 
acteristic local aspects. For lesser places 
there were 22 cuts which served to repre- 
sent 69 different towns. Three cuts of a 
monastery did for 23; 2 views of a Papal 
Synod in session, for 22; 44 portraits of a 


King, and 28 of a Pope, for 270 and 
326 individuals respectively. 

The record of fifteenth-century 
printing in Germany is explained by 
the economic transformation of the 
Rhine Valley. Increasing numbers of 
people in the towns worked longer 
hours at their industries, and bought 
their food instead of raising it. The 
amount of money in circulation be- 
came larger, and almost everybody 
had more of it than previously. People 


took more holidays and they bought 


THe Tower or BABEL 
From the Nuremberg Chronicle. Reduced 


things they had not formerly enjoyed; and more 
children were sent to school. More books were sold 
— both cause and effect of an ever greater amount 
of talk about all sorts of things, but chiefly about 
eternity and about those who made a profession of 
preparing people for it. In the later Middle Ages the 
business of book-making—copying by hand—was 
thoroughly established as a secular occupation as 
well as in the monastic houses, but the scribes could 
not meet this increasing demand, largely because the 
higher earnings of industrial laborers reduced their 
numbers. Some way of making books more quickly, 
and more cheaply, had to be found, and consequently 
typography was invented. There was no let-up in 
the spreading prosperity, and the printers met the 
demands upon them by developing their business 
into specialties — wholesale manufacture and sup- 
plies, book-selling and publishing. The intellectual 
activity of which these were the signs in the Ger- 
man-speaking countries flowered and went to seed 
in the Protestant Reformation. 


raga 


THE PRINTERS ENCOUNTER 
THE RENAISSANCE 


THE first road taken by the printers beyond the 
Rhine Valley led over the Alps to Italy. There the 
RevIvaL or Learninc had become a social as well 
as an intellectual factor in the life of the upper 
classes. The fact that this intellectual movement 
did not penetrate low enough to create a numerous 
book-buying public, could hardly have been fore- 
seen by the men who came from the busy Rhine 
cities. The consequence was that many of them 
worked themselves straight into bankruptcy by 
printing numerous editions of the literary classics. 
A season of bad weather and poor harvests brought 
hard times and a reorganization of the printing 
business. Those who survived were successful be- 
cause they changed the character of the books they 
put out, to meet the real interests of the people who 
could afford to patronize them. Treatises on the art 
of war, on mathematics and astrology, took the 
place of the ancient classics. 

CONRAD SWEYNHEYM and ARNOLD PANNARTZ set 
up the first press in Italy, at the Benedictine monas- 
tery of Sus1aco. One book was completed before 
the end of September, 1465, besides a “Donatus 
pro puerulis,”’ of which no copy is known, and which 
was doubtless issued as a sample of what they could 


[24 ] 


do. Two others were finished by the early summer 
of 1467. The three large works are representative of 
the kinds of books for which the first-comers ex- 
pected to find a ready market in Italy. The first was 
an ancient classic, Cicero de Oratore; the second 
contained the writings of “the Christian Cicero,” 
Lactantius, recommended for the purity of his lit- 
erary style; the third was the work of a Church 
Father, St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei. 

The type in which these Subiaco books were 
printed combines the more admired qualities of 
both the heavy angular Gothic letters of the north, 
and the smoothly rounded script which was in 
vogue in humanistic circles. Many lovers of fine 
printing regard it as the finest of all the early types. 


bradas mrer nofq3 recolendas :Nam pitta etate meidimus 
in ipam peurbationé difciplne ueceris :82 cofulatu deuent- 
mus i medin rex omniii certamé atqy difcrimen : 82 hoc ep 
omne polt cofularii obiecimus his fluctibus :qui p nos aco. 
muni pefte depulft m nos metifcs redundaret :Sed tamen 
teis uel alperitaribus rey uel angufliiscemporis obfequar 
ftudtis noftris:zqenm mibi uel fraus timicorum uel caufa 
amicoy::uel res.p. tribuer otii ad (cribendi porifima con, 
fer : Tibi uero tracer neq, bortanti deero neq; rogati:na 
neq; auctoritare quilq apud me plus ualerete poreft: neq 


It was followed closely by Emery Walker and Sid- 
ney C. Cockerell in designing the type now used by 
St. John Hornby for his Ashendene Press books, the 
finest product of a modern private press. 

At Subiaco, Sweynheym and Pannartz were under 
the patronage of the Abbot, Cardinal Turrecremata 
or Torquemada. He was a popular author as well 
as a powerful ecclesiastic, his “Exposition of the 
Psalms” as well as his “‘ Meditations on the Life of 
Christ”’ both appearing in many editions before the 
end of the century. It may be that the Cardinal 
shifted his favor, for the Meditations was the first 
book printed by another German who established 
himself at Rome in 1467. He was named Ulrich 
Han, latinized Udalricus Gallus, and is described 
in one of his own colophons as “the long-bearded 
rooster.” In this year Sweynheym and Pannartz 
also moved to Rome, where they were quartered in 
the house of the brothers de Maximis. The library 
of this house, containing a complete series of the 
books of these two printers (except the Donatus), 
remained intact until late in the nineteenth century. 

Both of the first Roman printing shops took as 
the model for their type the delicately rounded 
letter favored by the early renaissance scholars. 
This was the beginning of the regular use of the 
type still known as “roman,” commonly used for all 
ordinary printing. The Italian scribes used a lighter, 
thinner ink than the northerners, and in this also 


[ 26 J 


Murtce tam croceo matabit uelleraTuto. 

Sponte fua fandix palcencefueftret agnof, 

Ipfe lacte domum referent diftenta capelle. 

V bera. nec magnofmetuenc armenta leonef. 
Que Poeta fecundum Cumee Sibylle carmina 
Erycbrea uero fic att. 

Ot MEAVKOI KppEOO Ep OVPETIPKMAPESOpT at 
Xo pTopiraphHarictTéepidoicanaBookno op 
KPKTOIOVPMOOXOloip OMov Kal traci BpoT 
capkoBopoo TEALOp Parétar AXVOpPOP tr 
ovy BpEpeoI TEN pxKOpTEo auxTopol Kol) 


FROM THE EDITION OF THE Works OF LACTANTIUS PRINTED BY 
SWEYNHEYM AND PANNARTz AT RoME IN 1470 


The Greek type will be referred to on page 61 


they were followed by the printers. The result was 
that the pages have a much more refined, or less 
virile, effect when contrasted with the solid black 
mass of a page in the books made in Germany at 
the same time. 


VENICE BECOMES THE HEADQUARTERS 
OF THE BOOK TRADE 


In 1469 JoHN OF SPEIER introduced the new art to 
Venice. The city senate encouraged him with a 
grant of a monopoly of all printing for five years. 
He began modestly with an edition of a hundred 
copies of Cicero’s Epistolae ad familiares, of 125 
leaves; the result was that he had to follow this 
immediately with a second edition. Next came 
Pliny’s Historia naturalis, which filled 355 large 
leaves, and De Civitate Dei, on 274 leaves. While 
the latter work was in press, a visitation of the 
plague numbered the printer among its victims. 
His brother Wendelin finished the book in 1470 and 
claimed the right of succession to the monopoly; 
but the officials perceived the possibilities of the 
industry and refused to limit it again. The result 
was that Venice soon became the most active of all 
printing centres. 

Nico.Laus Jenson began printing at Venice when 
John of Speier’s monopoly was cancelled. He was a 
Frenchman, the first recorded printer who was not 
a German, and there is a legend that the French 
king had sent him to Mainz to learn about the new 
invention. At Venice he started work by designing 
a type in the roman character, which appears in 
what has been considered to be his first book, the 


[ 28 |] 


ED PHOENICVM theologiam iam perauctores 
fuos expofuimus quam omino ut peftiferam fugi 

endam & fanitate tantz infaniz querenda falutare 
predicat euangeliu:quod autem non fabulz dicte 
funt aut poetarum figmenta altius quiddam quafi 
nucleum contegentia: fed fapientum pnfcorum & 


De evangelica praeparatione of Eusebius. This type 
was at once recognized by his contemporaries as 
having the most admirable qualities in its design, 
and this opinion has held to the present day. Many 
judges of fine printing regard it as the most perfect 
type that has been produced for use in books in- 
tended for reading by the general public. It was 
closely copied by Emery Walker and T. J. Cobden 
Sanderson in the type designed for the latter’s 
Doves Press, which put out books of the highest 
typographical excellence from 1900 to 1916. 

The test which a well-designed type face must 
meet first of all is the way in which each separate 
letter fits every other letter, on either side. The 
scribes accomplished this adjustment to the adjoin- 
ing letters by minute changes in the form of the 
letter, going so far as to use regularly distinct forms, 
such as f or s, and many others less commonly, for 
certain combinations or for the middle or end of a 
word. The earliest printers copied many of these al- 
ternate forms, in their effort to produce something 


[29 ] 


just as good as the manuscript books. As soon as 
printing demonstrated its superiority as a means of 
production, simplification made rapid progress, al- 
though it was not until the nineteenth century that 
the last of these variant forms disappeared from all 
but antiquarian fonts, leaving the word-symbol & 
as the sole survivor of the oldest times. 

Jenson’s remarkable achievement was to meet all 
the tests of a readable type face better than any- 
one else. His type has only one fundamental fault, 
which may be inherent in its excellence. It is a 
generously rounded open-faced design, and this 
gives each letter greater width than usual. The re- 
sult is that there are fewer words on a line and 
page, and consequently more paper was required 
for a book in this type than for one with a more con- 
densed face. This made his books cost more than 
rival editions. Within two years Jenson recast his 
letters. This lessened the outstanding preéminence 
of the type, but helped him to maintain a leading 
position in the trade. The business of which he was © 
the head was consolidated shortly before his death 
in 1480 with the other principal Venetian firm, that 
of Johann de Colonia and Johann Manthen. Jenson’s 
name continued to appear in the colophons of the 
books issued by the joint publishers after his death, 
perhaps because of the commercial value of his per- 
sonal reputation, or for the simpler reason that his 
estate retained an active interest in the business. 


[ 30 ] 


Venice by 1480 was becoming the largest book- 
making centre. The leading men in the business 
were distributers, who hired the printers to produce 
books for which there was a world-wide market, 
rather than caterers to a local or national demand. 
Joint undertakings were the rule rather than the 
exception, two or more wholesalers uniting to com- 
mission an edition of a book for which they expected 
a good sale. Ocravianus Scotus, who may have 
succeeded to some of the business of the Jenson- 
Johann de Colonia firm, issued 66 books in his own 
name during the last two decades of the century. 
His name also occurs in colophons linked with those 
of Matteo Capcasa, Johannes and Gregorius de 
Gregortis, Antonius de Gusago, Johannes Hamman, 
Johannes Leoviler, Bonetus Locatellus, Andreas 
de Paltasichis, Christophorus de Pensis, Alber- 
tinus Rubeus, Johannes de Cereto de Trinino de 
Monteferrato alias Tacuinus, and Bartholomaeus 
de Zanis. Bonetus LocaTE.Lius was the printer 
whose name occurs more frequently than that of 
any other in Venetian books of the last fifteen 
fifteenth-century years, the number listed under 
his name in Konrad Burger’s index at the end 
of Copinger’s Supplement to Hain (London, 1902) 
being 144. His name also usually appears in books 
printed for Scotus, but none of the others named 
above as partners with Scotus are mentioned in 
connection with Locatellus, perhaps because some 


gras) 


of them may have been printers themselves. He did 
work for others, however —Nicolas de Frankfordia, 
Johannes Paep, “librari’”’ at Buda, Lazarus de 
Soardis, Andreas Torresanus, Perrinus Lathom1, 
Bonifacius Johannis and Johannes de Villa Veteri, 
and Jehan de Vingle. 

Venice enjoyed two advantages which account in 
part for its preéminence as a headquarters for the 
book trades. Paper-making had been the principal 
industry in several of the northern Italian towns, 
located on the streams which issue from the moun- 
tains, since the thirteenth century. This gave a 
steady supply of the printers’ most necessary raw 
material at a low cost. Venice was the world’s com- 
mercial metropolis throughout the period of the 
Renaissance, and this assured cheap transportation 
to the nearest port of every market where there was 
a call for books. Unbound, in sheets, the books were 
packed solidly in casks, and as the shipper could 
wait for favorable conditions, his rates were the 
lowest. A third factor had much to do with the vir- 
tual monopoly enjoyed by the Venetian publishers 
of all the standard lines of books. Italy was the 
home of humanism, the seat of the world’s most 
active intellectualism, and as a consequence books 
made in Italy were preferred by the buyers in every 
less favored country, entirely regardless of their 
intrinsic merit. 

Commercial success in the publishing or in the 


[ 32] 


printing business does not necessarily imply typo- 
graphic distinction in the output, and only one of 
Jenson’s immediate followers made a name for him- 
self as a fine printer. This was Eruarp Ratpo.t, 
who was the principal member of a firm that is- 
sued a group of books with woodcut borders and 
decorative initial letters which set a new style at 
the time and have been admired ever since. The 
other partners were Peter Léslein, who seems to 
have been the proof-reader and who doubtless had 
charge of the editorial side of the business, and 
Bernard Maler. The latter, whose name appears 
as Pictor in the Latin colophons, may have been 
Bernard a painter, from Augsburg, and therefore 
the designer of the decorations for which the credit 
has been given to the practical craftsman of the 
firm, Ratdolt. 

Ratdolt may have been employed at Nuremberg 
by Jonann MU LtER of Konigsberg, otherwise Reg- 
iomontanus or Monteregio, who was the most dis- 
tinguished astronomer of the time. Miiller had pro- 
vided himself with a private press in order to assure 
the accurate printing of his calendars andastronom- 
ical calculations, and perhaps to protect himself 
against theft of his figures by workmen not under 
his control. In 1475 Pope Sixtus IV summoned him 
to Rome to advise about the reform of the calendar, 
which was already noticeably out of harmony with 


the celestial bodies. The following year Ratdolt and 
ic fcial 


his two partners issued their first books at Venice, 
Miiller’s Kalendarium in an Italian as well as a 
Latin edition. This work has a claim to fame be- 
cause it appeared with a title-page in the modern 
style, with the names of the printers and the date at 
the foot, the whole enclosed in a border made up of 
decorative woodcuts. Most of their books, how- 
ever, appeared with a border specially designed to 
surround the text of the first page, the title being 
in a paragraph preceding the text, which was the 
ordinary style of the time. One of their character- 
istic borders is reproduced on the opposite page, 
from a tract by Celsus Maffeus printed in 1478. 
The border was intended by the designer, of course, 
to be used with a heavy-faced type, like that of 
the single line giving the title of the tract which ap- 
pears at the top of the page. 

Ratdolt continued towork at Venice for ten years, 
his 66 recorded books including works on geography, 
history, and standard religious treatises, but being 
mainly astronomical or on allied subjects. Then he 
returned to his native Augsburg, where he made a 
fresh reputation as the authorized printer of the 
service books required for that diocese. 


8} Pro facillima Turcorum expugnatione epiftola. 


PRINTING REACHES THE WHOLE 
EUROPEAN WORLD 


pare OME of the printers who set 
Sey4iout from Mainz made their 
Ne way up the Rhine to Baste, 
“eiwhich soon became an im- 
—portant centre for the dis- 
tribution of books for northern France. 
The reputation of its University gave 
prestige to its imprints, and the cosmo- 
politan character of the population led 
to the publication of works which found 
a ready sale along the diverging trade 
routes. The most travelled way led across 
to the Rhone and to Lyons. This was a | 
great trading centre, where the itinerant }> 
peddlers of every sort of ware congre- | 
gated to stock their packs before set- | 
ting forth to seek a market in central or | 


Hes 
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southern France. Among the shops at Lyons were 
many kept by the purveyors of reading matter, whose 
shelves were filled with small booklets such as had 
been made long before the days of printing, to be 
sold and not to be preserved. These shopkeepers 
welcomed the printers and set them to work pro- 
ducing books of a popular character. The solid liter- 
ature in Latin continued to be imported from Basle 
or from Venice until the end of the century, when 
the slow northward extension of the Renaissance in- 
fluence led the Lyonnese printers to engage learned 
editors and to enter into competition in this field. 

But their principal output continued to be books 
in the vernacular — romances, household manuals 
of health or husbandry, the “Romant de la Rose,” 
“La Légende dorée,”’ “Le Miroir de vie humaine,” 
and ‘‘La Somme rurale,” a handbook for the guid- 
ance of the local magistrates in the performance of 
unaccustomed judicial functions. Many of these 
were adorned with pictures, designed to widen the 
possible market. Such books as these, intended to 
interest all sorts of buyers throughout the country 
districts, prove the success with which this purpose 
was attained by being still among the most sought 
after, and likewise among the hardest to find, of 
all early publications. 

Some of the printers followed the traders to the 
provincial French centres, but they found patrons 
scarcer than in the corresponding Teutonic dis- 


[ 36 J 


tricts. A few kept on over the Pyrenees, to arouse 
the interest of a small but affluent group of widely 
scattered Spanish book-buyers. In the Hispanic 
peninsula the contact of racial and cultural strains 
produced conditions unlike those anywhere else. 
The late mediaeval scribes developed a distinctive 
handwriting, heavier and more substantial than that 
of other countries. The printers copied this, with the 
result that their books are splendidly impressive, 
unmatched for effective grandeur and dignity. 

The Hebrew communities possessed a large share 
of the intelligence as well as of the money in Spain 
and Portugal, and these gave to the new art its 
warmest welcome. Jewish craftsmen quickly mas- 
tered its details, and the numerous editions of the 
sacred writings and other Hebrew works which 
they produced rank high among early typographic 
masterpieces. 

The spreading stream of printers trickled across 
the Atlantic, close on the heels of the Spanish 
conquistadores. JoHANN CROMBERGER of Seville, 
the leading sixteenth-century Spanish printer, sent 
overseas an outfit in charge of a trusted workman, 
Juan Pas os, to establish the first American press 
at the City of Mexico in 1539. As long as the stock 
of imported paper held out, and at annual periods 
when it was replenished, Pablos was kept busy with 
notices, proclamations, and laws for the great Vice- 
roy Mendoza, missionary tractates edited by the 


375) 


Archbishop Zumarraga, and various helps for those 
who were trying to master the native languages. A 
piece of news, the account of the earthquake which 
destroyed Guatemala City in 1540, was the second 
product of this press which has survived. Half a 
century later, in 1584, Antonio Ricardo made his 
way to Lima in Peru. There he printed the papal 
proclamation decreeing the reform of the Roman 
calendar, and the results of an important diocesan 
convention, while the Viceroy was carrying on an 
anxious correspondence with the Crown authorities 
in Spain, who were trying to decide upon reasons 
why the printer should not be permitted to work in 
the distant colony. 


THE FIRST PRIVATE PRESSES 


Paris had the first French press, in 1470, but this 
differed from all of those already mentioned in that 
it was a private establishment and not an ordinary 
commercial venture. The rector and the librarian of 
the Sorbonne, with help from a wealthy ecclesiasti- 
cal patron, hired three workmen from Basle to print 
texts for their students, for which the latter pre- 
sumably paid, as well as other books which they 
wished to distribute to their friends. The librarian, 
Guillaume Fichet, wrote personal letters to accom- 
pany the presentation copies, and had them printed 
to go with the books. In one of these, dated New 
Year’s Day, 1471, he mentioned the fact that the 
new art had been discovered by Gutenberg; this 
was the first time that the name of the inventor is 
known to have appeared in type. 

The Orations of Cardinal Bessario is the most 
interesting book that came from the Sorbonne 
press. It was an appeal for universal peace among 
the Christian nations, in order that they might 
unite in opposing the advances of the Mussulman 
power. A copy of this book, richly illuminated and 
accompanied by a printed personal letter urging 
the cause for which it was issued, was sent to each 
European ruler and to many influential dignitaries. 
It took about a year to prepare these and dispatch 
them on their mission. Fichet’s copies of his letters, 


[39] 


and his correspondence with the Cardinal, were 
bound with a copy of the Orations, which is now 
in the Bibliotheque Nationale. 

The Sorbonne press was very active for nearly 
three years, producing 22 books in addition to the 
special work on the personal epistles and the like. 
Then Fichet and the rector, Heynlin, were obliged 
to leave Paris. The printers were unable to find an- 
other patron, and so moved out of the University 
precincts into a nearby shop. There they carried on 
a regular business, in competition with two rival es- 
tablishments conducted by French workmen, cater- 
ing to the needs of the students. 

The members of the royal house of the Valois had 
been for generations collectors of beautiful books 
and patrons of scribes and illuminators. The court 
of Burgundy rivalled its cousins of Paris in this, as 
in other respects. It was, therefore, a curious coin- 
cidence that the first press at Bruges was set up for 
the personal use of its owner, one of the court 
circle. He was a retired English wool merchant, 
Wiii1am Caxton, who was attached as financial 
adviser to the Duchess Margaret, sister of the Eng- 
lish King Edward IV. He had a taste for writing, 
and occupied his leisure in translating French ro- 
mances and the popular narratives of the time into 
his native tongue. These translations pleased the 
duchess, with the result that many in her train be- 
sought copies for themselves. 


[ 40 ] 


Caxton visited Cologne in 1471, and tarried there 
to complete a version of “Le Recueil des histoires 
de Troye.”’ The new way of multiplying books in- 
terested him, and he familiarized himself with its 
methods. When he returned to Bruges he provided 
the necessary equipment so that he might gratify 
his friends at court with copies of the book. This 
translation of the Troye book, the first book printed 
in English (but not printed 1 in England), was com- 
pleted probably in 1475. It was followed by “The 
Game and Pleye of the Chesse,” a treatise in which 
there is more of sermonizing than of gaming, and an 
even more serious account of “Les Quatre Derre- 
niéres Choses.”’ In the summer of 1476, Charles 
the Bold entered upon the campaign which was to 
end with his death at Nancy. The outcome must 
have been foreseen, and before the following Mich- 
aelmas Caxton returned to England, where he hired 
a shop, with the sign of a red pale, in the Sanctuary 
at Westminster. At Bruges, his type was used after 
he left by CoLtarp Mansion, who: may have been 
the workman employed by Caxton there. 

The first book printed in England that is dated, 
came from the shop at Westminster on November 
18, 1477. This is “The Dictes or Sayengis of the 
Philosophres.”” It was not translated by Caxton 
himself, but by his friend, the Queen’s brother, Earl 
Rivers, who is gaily chaffed by Caxton in an edi- 


torial epilogue. One of Caxton’s own works, the 


[41] 


History of Jason, may have been finished before 
the Dictes; it is not dated, and the impression 
of the type is so sharp that it must have been fresh 
from the moulds. These two works were soon fol- 
lowed by Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. 

ENGLAND was the only country in which printing 
started with books in the native language. Its first 
press was employed throughout its career in produc- 
ing works in its own literature. The glory of this fact 
is not diminished by the explanation that the conti- 
nental book-traders, whose agents visited London 
regularly, could undersell any attempt to produce 
Latin works; or that English scholars preferred edi- 
tions having the prestige of a continental imprint. 

Caxton printed more than a hundred works of 
which some vestige still remains. A high percentage 
of these is now known from only a single copy, and 
as many more are represented by fragments, some- 
times consisting of no more than a few lines rescued 
from the lining or the pasteboard of a binding. This 
is sufficient proof that there must have been many 
other editions which have entirely disappeared. The 
fact that a majority of his books were small pam- 
phlets containing popular tales in verse or prose ex- 
plains why so many of them were completely worn 
out by readers. 

The CanTerBury TALES were printed twice, 
from different manuscripts. Other works that came 
from the Westminster press, which still have a place 


aa] 


on the shelves of readers of English literature, are 
Gower, Confessio Amantis,”’ some of the poems of 
LypcaTE, Matory’s “Morte d’Arthur,”’ HigDEN’s 
“Polychronicon,” the Chronicles of England, and 
“The Golden Legend.” Caxton also printed his own 
translations of Aésop, “ Reynard the Fox,” and sev- 
eral French romances. 

The small books containing tales which were cer- 
tain of a ready sale, or equally merchantable relig- 
ious works, the Hours of the Blessed Virgin, the 
Latin Psalter, and sundry moral treatises, probably 
served to keep the workmen busy when they were 
not occupied with the larger works from the owner’s 
pen. He was first of all a business man, and doubt- 
less saw to it that his venture, even though it was 
intended primarily for his own purposes, did not 
cost him more than need be. His foreman was prob- 
ably a Fleming, Wynxyn DE WorbpeE, for the latter 
became the owner of the printing plant after Cax- 
ton’s death, about 1491, and carried it on for forty- 
three years. Wynkyn prospered, continuing to put 
out a steady succession of editions of the small 
popular pamphlets which were started in Caxton’s 
time. 


THE USE OF PICTURES 


Woopcutt pictures came into extensive use in Ger- 
many during the fourteenth century. Whether they 
were first used for saints or sinners is one of the 
questions that 1s not likely to be settled. PLayine 
Carps entered Europe from Asia by any one of a 
dozen trade routes, and were quickly followed by 
persons who knew how to make them by taking 1m- 
pressions from a block of wood on which the design 
was cut, or else by daubing the figures through a 
stencil. Both of these methods had long before been 
used in China. The same methods were used to pro- 
duce pictures of saints, for which a demand was 
created by the increasing number of worshippers at 
popular shrines. The artisans of the Rhine towns, 
as their income increased, took holidays more often 
and for longer periods, and the local ecclesiastical 
officials contributed to this practice by organizing 
pilgrimages to these holy places. The pilgrimages 
frequently enrolled a large percentage of the inhab- 
itants of a town, who went off together for a trip 
which sometimes lasted several days. They became 
a characteristic feature of fifteenth-century life, and 
had an important social and intellectual, as well as 
religious, influence upon the people of northern 
Europe. Incidentally they led to a larger demand 
for the hez/igen, or little pictures of saints. This was 
met by using stencils and engraved wooden blocks to 


[44] 


replace the rough sketches, made by hand, which the 
priests had formerly kept for sale. These pictures 
were produced in vast numbers; the fact that many 
hundreds of them still exist in German libraries is 
the best evidence of the enormous quantity which 
must have been made. 

Many of these pictures of saints have inscrip- 
tions, ordinarily a statement of the heavenly re- 
ward awaiting a faithful worshipper, the lettering 
being cut on the block as a part of the picture. Two 
of these inscriptions include a date, although in 
neither case is there anything to prove that this is 
when the picture was made. One, a Saint Christo- 
pher with the date 1423, has been known since 
1769, when it was discovered pasted on the inside of 
the binding on a manuscript in the famous library 
of the Charterhouse at Buxheim, near Memmingen; 
it passed to Earl Spencer, and is now in the John 
Rylands Library at Manchester, England. This 
was the earliest known dated print until 1840, when 
a picture of the Virgin was found on the cover of an 
old box filled with ancient documents at Malines in 
Flanders, with the date 1418. 

These pictures with lettering developed, quite in- 
dependently of the invention of typography, into 
Brock Books, in which each page was printed from 
a wood block on which the text and illustrations 
were engraved. The impression was taken by rub- 


bing the paper, which was laid on the block after 
[45 ] 


this had been dabbed with a thin, brownish ink, en- 
tirely different from the viscous black ink used for 
printing on a press. Only one side of each leaf could 
be used by this method, so that the first printed 
page was followed by two blanks and then by two 
printed pages. The books produced in this way 
which have survived to the present day appear to 
have been made about 1470, but it is probable that 
the method had been used much earlier. 

The Bisi1a Pauperum, or Poor Man’s Bible, 
was the work most frequently issued as a block 
book. It was presumably in demand as a help for 
unlearned preachers who found its pictures of the 
life of Christ with parallel Old Testament episodes, 
with appropriate texts, useful. Other similar works 
were the Art of Dying, the Song of Songs as a 
parable of the Blessed Virgin, the Apocalypse, 
the Speculum or Mirror of Man’s Salvation, and 
the Coming of Antichrist. 

The first books with woodcut pictures and typo- 
graphic text were issued by ALBRECHT PFISTER of 
Bamberg. His type was that of the Thirty-six-line 
Bible, and some of his books are dated 1461. Seven 
have survived, and of these seven, five are in the 
vernacular. They are a Donatus (known from 
two leaves, slightly mutilated); Bonar, “Edelstein” 
(two editions, one copy of each); “Die historij von 
Joseph, Danielis, Judith, Hester’’ (dated 1462, two 
copies); Ackermann von Boehmen, “Der Licht- 


L 46 ] 


streit des Mensschen mit dem Tode”’ (two editions; 
one copy of the first lacking 6 of the 24 leaves, one 
of the missing leaves being in another library; three 
of the second); the Biblia Pauperum in German 
(two editions; three copies of the first; one of the 
second); Biblia Pauperum in Latin (two copies); 
Jacobus de Theramo, “Belial”? (in German, two 
copies, both incomplete, and three other leaves). 


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FRoM THE BIBLE IN GERMAN, PRINTED BY KOBERGER 
AT NUREMBERG IN 1483 


After 1470 the use of pictures in books became 
general. These books are valued to-day because they 
area characteristic expression of the national artistic 


[47 J 


spirit, as well as because they portray contempor- 
ary life, costumes, and ideas. AucsBuRG was the 
principal German city for the making of illustrated 
books, a succession of editions of the Bible in the 
vernacular with many small pictures being note- 
worthy. Um produced an important edition of 
Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, with full-page maps of 
the known world, in 1482, reprinted in 1486. From 
other towns came a number of chronicles of univer- 
sal history, with special attention to that of the lo- 
cality where the book was to be sold. The vogue of 
these chronicles is a sign of awakening interest in 
the historic past and of a consciousness of national 
or racial continuity. This is even more evident in 
the popularity of a much less entertaining book, 
the Fasciculus Temporum, compiled by Werner 
Rolewinck of Cologne, a prolific literary worker of 
the time. Of this diagrammatic epitome of univer- 
sal history, 33 editions were printed in Latin, Ger- 
man, French, or Spanish, between 1474 and 1500. 
In eared of Aheee the final paragraphs contain the 
latest news of importance, showing an editorial 
desire to keep the work up to date. 


Ry 
SAE Uy) 


Border from a Florentine Book of about 1490 


THE DECADE OF PICTURE BOOKS 


Durinc the last decade of the fifteenth cen- 
tury, for some reason not at all clear, there 
was a sudden increase in the supply of, and 
presumably in the demand for, small popular 
illustrated books, in the Rhineland, Venice 
and Florence, and Paris. In each of these 
places this found expression in a different but 
essentially characteristic way. 
SEBASTIAN Brant, a Professor of Laws at 
Basle, with a taste for literature, became the 
| most popular German author of his day by 
issuing his own versified writings, as well as 
an edition of Terence, with numerous illus- 
trations. His “Narrenschiff,’ the SHip oF 
Foots, was published in 1494, and forthwith 
B| became the best-known picture book of the 


‘- 


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A FIrrEENTH-CENTURY STRIKE 


FROM THE SHIP oF FooLs 


BASLE, 1497 


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time. It, and its 114 illustrations portraying all the 


phases of contemporary life, 


editions at Nuremberg, 


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before the year was out, and some 25 editions were 


[50] 


issued within the next fifteen years. Whatever dul- 
ness the author’s moralizing may give this work is 
more than atoned for, to modern book-lovers, by 
the graphic style in which his artist epitomized the 
daily life of the time and its especial manifestations 
of universal human weaknesses. 

The typical Venetian illustrated books of this 
decade contain small cuts inserted in the text at the 
beginning of each chapter or section. The printers 
had already perceived that the shorter line secured 
by placing two columns of text on each page of a 
folio book — the equivalent of the later newspaper 
column — was much easier to read than the long 
line the full width of the page. The interest of read- 
ers, and the sale of the books, were further stimu- 
lated by small pictures, the width of the column. 
The most famous book treated in this manner is the 
Malermi Bible, of which the first illustrated edition 
appeared in 1490, filled with pictures representing 
all the familiar biblical episodes. This Bible was re- 
peatedly reprinted, and for more than half a cen- 
tury the illustrations reappear, one or more at a 
time, in countless other works, sometimes from the 
original wood blocks but more often in copies of 
varying excellence. Rivalling this as a popular pub- 
lication were three editions of Dante’s works. In 
these, as in other works similarly illustrated, many 
of the cuts contain two, three, or even four groups 
showing the same characters at successive moments 


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VIRGIL AND DANTE CROSSING THE STYX, 
FROM A VENICE EDITION OF 1492 


— 


in the progress of the narrative — making these the 
earliest moving pictures. 

HypnerotomacuHia Po.ipHiti,—or “The Strife 
of Love in a Dream”’ as the early English version 
has it,—by Francesco Colonna, is the closest rival to 
the Nuremberg Chronicle in perennial fame. A little 
less widely known and harder to procure, although 
not appreciably higher in price, its artistic qualities 
are much more highly esteemed by those whose 
judgment carries weight. It is an extraordinary 


Esad 


book from every point of view. There is nothing 
quite like it in contents, language, or illustration. It 
was printed by Aldus in 1499, but has no connection 
with anything else that he did. The author pro- 
duced an archaeological romance written in a vocab- 
ulary in which the Italian, Latin, and Latinized 
Greek words mingle as promiscuously as his ran- 
dom ideas are inconstant. The work was apparently 
printed for a dilettante circle which appreciated the 
very best in book illustration. The 168 pictures, 
of varying size and unusual variety, are unexcelled 
for perfect suitability to their purpose — use with 
type. The woodcutter was as skilful as the artist, 
and both had an instinctive feeling for the precise 
weight of line and the balance of design which 
matches that of the accompanying page of text. 
FLORENCE was at first unfriendly to the earlier 
printers, for the wealthy merchants who set the 
fashions for the citizens preferred the beautifully 
illuminated manuscripts for which they were well 
able to pay. An effort was made to meet their desire 
for books that cost more than others could afford, 
by issuing the “ Monte Santo di Dio”’ in 1477, anda 
Dante in 1481, with illustrations from copper en- 
gravings instead of the common woodcuts. Copper 
plates were used about the same time, more success- 
fully, for the maps in Berlinghieri’s version of the 
Geography of Ptolemy in ¢erza rima. Woodcuts 
are printed with the type, whereas the metal en- 


a3 al 


gravings require a separate impression and a differ- 
ent kind of printing, so that not only are they more 
costly, but the chances of error are greater. In the 
Dante, the second plate was used again for the third 
picture, and this blunder apparently put an end for 
a while to further attempts in this line. 
Unheralded by anything of just the same sort 
elsewhere, the printers who had established them- 
selves at Florence put out a succession of small il- 
lustrated tracts and booklets during the decade of 
the fourteen-nineties, intended for a large sale to the 
populace. There were two groups of these, similar in 
style. The first were the RappRESENTAZIONE, con- 
taining the text of plays portraying Biblical stories 


J 





or the lives of saints, each with one or more pictures. 
These plays continued on sale in frequent editions 
until late in the following century, the original cuts 
being used over and over again, for the most part 
with very slight traces of wear. The popularity of 
the earlier editions is one bit of evidence that the 
Florentine public was developing the state of mind 
which led to the outburst of evangelicanism, or the 
spirit of reform, which was inspired by the preach- 
ing of SavonaRoLA. The impassioned friar drove 
home the lessons of his discourses by publishing the 
sermons and other religious tracts, with illustrations 
in the same style as those of the Rappresentazione. 
These pictured the preacher and his audience, 


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heaven and hell, the glory of God and of those who 
do worthily. The unconscious skill with which these 
unpretentious woodcuts convey their message has 
given them a high place in the annals of artistic 
expression. 

The Book or Hours was the medium in which the 
Paris publishers made their great contribution to 
the history of book illustration during the quarter- 
century following the year 1490. The Livre d’heures, 
or Horee Beatee Virginis Mariee, was the layman’s 
manual of devotion through whose use the worship 
of the Virgin Mother of Christ gained a widespread 
impetus during the Middle Ages. The book came to 
be the work most frequently placed in the hands of 
artists and illuminators, who lavished on it their ut- 
most skill. Copies decorated by the staff of artists 
maintained by Jean Duc de Berri, and those made 
for other members of the Valois family or for their 
cousins of England when the latter were dominant 
in Paris, are among the most desirable books ever 
made. The fame of these superb treasures, the per- 
fection of the miniaturists’ art, created a desire for 
similar books among those who were in the court 
circles. As wealth became general, more and more 
people who could afford to gratify their ambitions 
contributed to the prosperity of the makers of these 
illuminated books. The business of producing them 
became a very highly organized industry at Paris, 
employing hundreds of artists and subsidiary crafts- 


[56] 


men. It commanded the services of the most expert 
scribes and decorators from all over Europe, but 
chiefly from Flanders and northern France. Each of 
these brought to Paris his native style, and he con- 
tinued to practise this in the metropolis, with more 
or less modification, to the confusion of the modern 
experts who try to identify places of origin by the 
artistic stigmata. The confusion is increased by the 
fact that the information implied by the names of 
special saints and holy days added to the calendar 
is equally deceptive, unless it 1s supported by other 
evidence. The fifteenth-century Paris bookshops 
kept these books in stock for sale to the foreign visi- 
tors who thronged to the city, and the buyer could 
have inserted at the shortest notice the names of his 
patron and name saints, or the days associated with 
his place of worship many leagues away, even across 
the Channel. At last, before the final decade of that 
century, the size of the business brought its own de- 
struction. There was over-production, and the illu- 
minated Horee became so common that they ceased 
to be desirable and quickly passed from favor. 

The demand for the Hore, as a devotional man- 
ual, continued to be as great as before, and called to 
the printers to meet it. They did this, with the assis- 
tance of wood engravers who were as skilful in their 
way as the colorists in theirs. The book was issued 
with a full-page illustration at the beginning of each 
division, and with woodcut borders on every page. 


oe 


This met with instant favor, and a dozen publishers 
entered into lively rivalry in the effort to supply the 
most attractive book in the new manner. PHILIPPE 
PicoucHET carried off the palm with an edition 1s- 
sued in August, 1498. Every page had its appropri- 
ate border composed of delicately executed minia- 
ture engravings on wood, or on metal handled the 
same way that the wood blocks were, each separated 
by set figures and ornamental designs, and varied by 
woodland and hunting scenes. This series of bor- 
ders, which continued in regular use until 1502, is 
held in the highest esteem, but it is only one of 
several of very nearly equal merit, which appear in 
other editions, issued by Pigouchet or by his princi- 
pal rivals, Simon Vostre and THIELMAN KERVER. 
ANTOINE VERARD, who had a secure position as the 
fashionable purveyor of illustrated books to the 
court circle, and Jean pu Pr#, who printed books 
for the others, also issued editions, as did several 
minor publishers. The competition dropped after 
the turn of the century, and less care was taken to 
keep the pictures in their proper order. The various 
series of cuts became distributed among different 
printers, so that examples of the best period are oc- 
casionally found in later editions. 

The Book of Hours, like the Book of Common 
Prayer, is one of the few works to which decoration 
may appropriately be applied without offending the 


stricter canons of fine book- making. It is a basic 
L L 58 ] 


ies 


principle that there must be nothing in a really good 
book which interferes with the attention of the 
reader. Decorations which distract by drawing the 
eye away from the text cannot be justified, except 
in a work which ought to be so familiar to the user 
that close attention to the print is unnecessary. 

The Paris Horee met with instant appreciation 
by an eager public, and they held the market for 
more than a quarter of a century. New editions 
came out at the rate of one a month. The list of 
the recorded editions compiled by Hanns Bohatta 
(Vienna, 1909) gives the titles of 170 issued for the 
use of the Diocese of Paris between 1490 and 1500. 
There must have been as many more with variant 
sections specially printed for the provincial dio- 
ceses. About 350 more are listed for the years 1500 
to 1525. Signs of waning popularity begin to appear 
in cruder borders designed in different styles. Even 
the skill of Gzorroy Tory, whose first edition ap- 
peared in 1525, could do no more than delay the in- 
evitable change in taste. Their popularity fell off 
just at the time when public interest in the funda- 
mentals of religion was being stimulated. 


THE LEARNED PRINTERS 


Tue New Learning began to lose its dominant po- 
sition among the intellectual classes as the sixteenth 
century developed other and more spiritual inter- 
ests. Its powerful influence continued to penetrate 
to other social classes and to the countries which 
were beyond the range of its earlier enthusiasms. 
The task of spreading this influence, and of pre- 
serving what cultural life had gained, was taken up 
by two families of printers, in Venice and in Paris. 
Each established itself upon a prosperous business 
built on a reputation for scholastic authority, and 
both ended by proving that learning alone will not 
meet the needs of the world. 

A.tpus Manuttus went to Venice in 1488 for the 
purpose of promoting Greek studies by issuing 
better texts than had theretofore been obtainable. 
He had won the favor of the Roman family of the 
Carpi, while a tutor in its household, and this made 
possible his early success. His first book was in a 
type which he might have designed himself, but by 
1494 he had secured another more carefully made. 
Having in mind the imperative necessity of produ- 
cing books which should not be expensive, so that 
they might be within the means of many who longed 
to share in the knowledge of the ancient classics, 
Aldus chose as the model for his Greek type a cur- 


[ 60 J 


sive hand, such as was used for ordinary purposes in 
writing. Before this, Greek books had been printed 
in types modelled on the square, inscriptional style 
of lettering used for ancient books. This made a 
beautiful and legible page, but each letter took so 
much space that the books were very costly. The 
cursive hand, as used currently, was compact, and 
its use for familiar correspondence, note-taking, and 
the like, had developed countless scribal short-cuts 
or abbreviations which took for granted that the 
reader had an intimate familiarity both with the 
language and with the subject of the writing. The 
commoner of these abbreviations were taken over 
by the printers. It was such a hand-writing that 
Aldus copied, sacrificing legibility to the need for 
cheapness. The type was enthusiastically welcomed 
as a great service to scholarship, and this initial 
popularity fixed it as the standard Greek type to 
the present time. 

Aldus, before the end of the century, completed 
an edition of Aristotle’s works in five folio volumes, 
carefully edited and printed. This effectively estab- 
lished his reputation in the learned world. Within 
the same five years he brought out a Greek Gram- 
mar, editions of Theocritus and Aristophanes, a 
Thesaurus Cornucopiee and a Greek Dictionary, a 
Greek Psalter and a Greek Hore. 

Having accomplished his original purpose, Aldus 
turned his attention to the Latin classics. He also 


[61 J 


married thedaughter of a prosperous master-printer, 
Andreas Torresanus, whose interest in maintaining 
a good standard in his own work had been proved 
twenty years earlier, when he purchased the types of 
Jenson after the latter’s death. After this marriage, 
and perhaps before, Aldus had the advantages of his 
father-in-law’s establishment and advice. The first 
of his Latin classics was an edition of Lucretius in 
quarto, which came out in 1500. This was followed 
the next year by Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, 
and Martial, each in a format hitherto unheard of 
for a scholarly book. These were little books, octavos 
measuring about 6 by 4 inches. The success of the 
idea was immediate; the series became the “ Every- 
man’s Library”’ of that day. 

Aldus placed the ancient classic authors within 
the reach of all, in editions prepared with scholarly 
skill, carefully edited, and accurately printed. Con- 
temporary praise was effusive as well as sincere, and 
the authorities of Venice and the Papacy granted 
him their protection in the exclusive rights to his 
idea. Even more convincing was the flattery of imi- 
tation. The Aldine octavos, and the type which 
made them possible, were copied, so closely as to be 
almost indistinguishable, by more than one enter- 
prising rival. These pirated editions appeared at 
Florence and at Lyons, and almost certainly also 
in Venice; it has been suggested that some of the 
copies bearing the marks of Florentine or Lyonnese 


L 62 J 


printers may have emanated from Venice, while the 
foreign printers omitted any sign which would call 
attention to the fact that the books were not genuine 
Aldines. Aldus was moved to print a circular letter 
protesting strongly against the injury caused by 
these piracies. Not only did they lessen his sales, but 
the purchasers suffered more than they gained by the 
lower price, because the only things his rivals did 
not copy faithfully were his textual and typographi- 
cal accuracy. He pointed out some of the more ab- 
surd misprints; the immediate result of this was that 
the pirate printers reprinted the offending pages, 
so that their remaining copies did not have the 
identifying stigmata. 

The type which made the octavo editions possi- 
ble was an adaptation of the idea which had already 
made his Greek books a success. It was modelled on 
the cursive handwriting in current use, and accord- 
ing to one statement the letters were copied directly 
from a manuscript of Petrarch’s writings. This type 
was at first called “Venetian,” or “Italic” in other 
countries, and the latter name has clung to it. It 1s 
much more compact than the roman type, and 
more pleasing on first acquaintance; but the judg- 
ment of time has been against it for ordinary use. 

In the summer of 1502 Aldus adopted, as a mark 
by which his editions might be recognized, the an- 
chor and dolphin, the first signifying surety and the 


other speed. This mark, as well as the Aldine name, 
(163 i 


have been adopted by later printers more frequently _ 
than any others, as symbolizing the highest ideals 
of the craft. 

The Italian classics, beginning with a Petrarch in 
July, 1501, took their place alongside the Latin in 
the octavo format. Dante followed a year later, in 
August, the second book to carry the anchor and 
dolphin. Greek books continued to take about half 
the time of the press, for the most part in larger 
sizes, but a Sophocles in octavo appeared the same 
month as the Dante, and a Homer in two small 
volumes was finished late in 1504. 

For nearly three years the little volumes were 
published at the rate of about one a month. Then the 
French troops entered Italy again, and the printers 
did little more than complete the works already in 
hand. From December of 1506 until December of 
1507, and again from April, 1509, to October, 1512, 
nothing is recorded in the lists of Aldine imprints. 
Like many of his colleagues, no doubt, Aldus spent 
his time trying to collect what was due from his cor- 
respondents in other cities. During 1508 the work- 
men were kept occupied by two large volumes, the 
Adagu of Erasmus, with 276 leaves, and the first 
volume of Rhetores Graeci, with 375. These were 
followed in November of this year by an octavo 
Plinius Secundus, the first complete edition of the 
Epistles, from an ancient manuscript which a Vene- 
tian ambassador had brought to him from Paris. 


L 64 J 


D el'empia Babiloniasond’e fuggrta 
O gni uergogna,ond'ogné bene é fori; 
Albergo di dolor, madre d'errori 
Son fu grie per allungar la wita. 
Qui mi fio folo;et come amor m'inuitd, 
Hor rime ¢ uerfi bor colgo herbette et fiori 
Sem parlando,et 4 tempi migliort 
Sempre penfando;et quefto fol m’ ait: 
N e del uulgo mi ail,ne di. fortund, 
Ne di me molto,ne di ofa uile; 
Ne dentro fento,ne di fuor gran aldo: 
S ol due perfone cheggio;et uorrei luna 
Col cor uer me paafiatto e humile; 
L’altro ool pie, fi come mai fir, faldo- 


I n mezyo di duo amanti honefte altera 
Vidi una donna, et quel fignor cn lei, 
Che fra gli huomini regna et fra li Deis 
et da [un lato il fole,io da Valty'era. 

P oi che s'aaorfé chiufa da la {pera 
De l'amico pin bello;a gliocchi miei 
Tutte lieta fi uolfe:¢g ben iiorret, 

Che mai non foffe inuer di me piu fera- 

S ubito in allegrezXa fi conuerfe 
La gelofia,che'n fu la prima uifte 
Per fi alto aduerfarto al cor mi nacque: 

A lui la facia lagrimofa et trifte 
Vn mauiletto intorno riconerfe: 

Cotanto Leffer uinto li difpiaeque - 





FRom THE ALDINE PETRARCH OF ISOI 


The name of ANDREAS TORRESANUS DE ASULA 
appears in the colophon of the 1508 Pliny for the 
first time as a partner of Aldus. This suggests that 
some financial rearrangement had become neces- 
sary, or else that the health of Aldus was failing, for 
the two names continue until the latter’s death in 
April, 1515. Torresanus then assumed the direction 
of the establishment, assisted by his two sons, and 
retaining the phrase “In aedibus Aldi” in the im- 
prints. They maintained the reputation of the press 
for excellent printing, if they could not add to its 
standing among scholars. 

After Torresanus died, in 1529, all book-making 
ceased until 1533, when Paut Manutrtus, the son 
of Aldus, came of age. He at once entered upon a 
life-long effort to renew the prestige of the press. He 
sought out his father’s old friends whose gatherings 
had made the Aldine house the literary centre of 
Venice, and tried to interest his own scholarly con- 
temporaries in the attempt to stave off the decad- 
ence of the city. He bought new fonts of type; where 
Lyons and Paris had copied his father, he now sent 
his commissions to the famous French type designer 
Claude Garamond. It was a losing struggle, and his 
own real interests were elsewhere. The family tradi- 
tion made him a scholar even more than a printer. 
The five years from 1556 to 1561 were devoted to a 
proposed “Academia della Fama,” which was to 
draw to Venice the most learned men who could 


[ 66 J 


be attracted by generous patronage, from all the 
world; then the merchant who had promised an en- 
dowment failed, but not before it had been demon- 
strated that much more besides money is needed to 
make such a plan successful. The printer was called 
to Rome by Pope Pius IV, to undertake an equally 
ambitious plan for printing everything which it was 
desirable that the faithful should read, with the 
revisions made necessary by the decrees of the 
Council of Trent. Once more it proved easier to 
promise money than to provide the time which 
such an undertaking requires. 

The second Atpus Manutius, born in 1547, was 
placed in charge of the Venice establishment in 
1565, and spent much of the ensuing decade until 
the death of his father, Paul, in 1574, trying to 
make some profitable arrangement by which it 
might be carried on by more experienced manage- 
ment without loss of the inherited prestige. Even 
his marriage to an heiress of the famous printing 
family of the Giuntas of Florence did not bring 
successful direction to the Venice business. The 
younger Aldus was even more famous than his 
father for great learning. He was an infant prodigy 
for erudition, and it was said that he edited, or 
helped his father to edit, the Epistles of Cicero, at 
the age of twelve. After 1576, having leased the 
right to use the press and the famous trade-mark, 
he devoted himself to the more congenial profession 


[ 67 J 


of teaching Belles Lettres. He died, the last of the 
family, in 1597. Hailed as the most learned man of 
his time, he lived too late; learning had become 
erudition, and the Renaissance had given way to the 
modern world. 


THE PATRONS OF PRINTING 


WHEN the French troops occupied northern Italy 
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, JEAN 
GROLIER accompanied them as the financial repre- 
sentative of the royal treasury. He came of a family 
of Italian bankers, settled at Lyons, and made his 
own prosperous career in official positions, rising 
to the dignity and responsibility of treasurer to the 
Crown. He was also, for more than half a century, 
the greatest collector of his time, the sixteenth- 
century successor to the earlier Medici. He estab- 
lished a reputation in bookish circles as the model 
for book-collectors. This rests upon two characteris- 
tics, a generous patronage of the book-makers who 
were producing fine work, and the most careful 
treatment of his possessions. The bindings with 
which he had his books covered are so famous that 
there is a common misconception that he was him- 
self a book-binder. He maintained a staff of crafts- 
men in his own palace, employing the most skilful 
artisans, who developed the characteristic designs 
which have come to be known as Grolieresque. The 
typical feature of these is the interlacing of ribbons 
of various harmonious colors to make a design or 
border on the sides of the bindings. Similar designs 
were executed by other binders for other patrons, 


especially in Italy, and they have been copied with 
[69 J 


great skill and remarkable ability in giving the ap- 
pearance of sixteenth-century workmanship. Gro- 
lier’s own books sometimes contain his motto, and 
the friendly inscription “J. Grolierii et amicorum, ” 
and this is more frequently found stamped at the 
foot of the binding. The phrase was not his alone, 
for it is also found on the bindings executed for two 
contemporary collectors, Thomas Maioli of Asti and 
Marc Lauwrin of Bruges. 

Grolier, while his headquarters were at Milan, 
became acquainted with Aldus and established a 
lifelong friendship with his family. He kept in- 
formed about what the press was doing, and had a 
standing order for several copies of each important 
book, on vellum or on extra fine paper if possible. 
He also commissioned work to be done on his own 
account. Aldus in turn dedicated books to the 
patron, expressing his appreciation in the prefatory 
epistles. This was the most famous of these friend- 
ships, but Geofroy Tory and others of the Paris 
printers were equally in his favor. 

The name of an owner occurs on bindings much 
less frequently than the crest or coat of arms, or a 
personal device. These go with special bindings, 
which were customary when books were ordinarily 
kept in stock in sheets, to be bound when sold, so 
that this did not imply the destruction of an original 
cover except in the case of older manuscript works. 
The use of a bookplate as a sign of ownership, also, 


[70 ] 


had already begun. The earliest known may even be 
older than typography, for it has the name of the 
owner, Hans Igler, cut on the block with a crude de- 
sign much like the little woodcut pictures of saints. 

HILDEBRANDE BRANDENBURG established a note- 
worthy place for himself in bookish annals by in- 
serting an attractive plate, an angel holding a shield 
with the family arms, in the books that he gave 
to the Carthusian monastery at Buxheim toward 
the end of the fifteenth century. The library of 
this house was dispersed during the French Revo- 
lution, and volumes containing this plate are now 
widely scattered amongst appreciative collectors. 
The earliest dated plate is a woodcut designed by 
ALBRECHT Dwrer in 1516 for Hieronymous Ebner. 
Another Diirer plate is even more famous, executed 
on copper in 1524, with the portrait of the owner, 
BiL1BALD PIRCKHEIMER. He was a Nuremberg 
jurist, who became councillor to Maximilian I, and 
maintained an active correspondence with the lead- 
ing humanists of his time. He also had another 
Diirer plate, and a third one by another designer. 
Some twenty armorial designs are listed as Diirer’s 
which may have been used as bookplates, and there 
are similar engravings credited to Lucas Cranach, 
Jost Amman, and Hans Trochsel. 


CONFLICTING TENDENCIES AT 
PARIS AND GENEVA 


Tue EstIEnneE family at Paris was a rival to that of 
Aldus for three generations, along closely parallel 
lines. The first Henri Estienne, Etienne, or Ste- 
phanus, acquired an active business in 1501 when 
he married Guyonne, the widow of Jean Higman. 
Higman had established a strong University con- 
nection, and this was broadened by his successor. 
For twenty years Estienne printed solid works on 
theology and philosophy, and orthodox scientific 
treatises, edited by the leading professors of the Sor- 
bonne. His son Robert set up for himself in 1525 
through an amicable arrangement with his step- 
father, Simon de Colines, who has taken Estienne’s 
place as the third husband of Guyonne and the 
manager of the printing establishment. 

Rogserr EsTIENNE was a good printer, and a 
scholar of distinction who took an important part 
in bringing the Renaissance to France. The story is 
that, when he was asked to reprint the standard 
Latin Dictionary of Calepin, he found that this was 
so far behind the movement of linguistic scholar- 
ship that he decided it would be easier to make up 
a new work than to correct the errors in the old one; 
and as he could not find anyone to do this to his 
satisfaction, he prepared the new one himself. This 


eee 


“Thesaurus linguae Latinae’”’ occupied him for 
nearly two years, appearing in 1532, when he was 
thirty years old. His wife was the daughter of 
Bapius AscEnsius, the most noted editor of that 
time, whose works were recognized as authoritative 
and enjoyed a wide sale throughout Europe. Badius 
was provided with a press in his own house, so that 
he might direct the printing of his publications and 
secure the utmost accuracy with an economy of 
time and effort. The books from this press, known 
as the Praelitum Ascensianum, are still in demand, 
less for the learned editing than because of the 
printer’s mark, which is a view of a printing shop 
giving one of the earliest representations of a press 
in operation. 

Robert Estienne began his career by revising the 
text of the New Testament exactly as the scholars 
of his day were dealing with other ancient texts. He 
based his work on the original versions which had 
been made available in the famous ComMpLuTeEnN- 
s1An PotyGLorr edition, issued under the auspices 
of Cardinal Ximenes at Alcal4 in 1514-1517. Ex- 
cept for the Psalter published by Giustiniani at 
Genoa in 1516, — with the text in Hebrew, a literal 
Latin rendering, the Latin Vulgate, the Greek Sep- 
tuagint, Arabic, and Chaldee,— the monumental 
Spanish work was the first edition of the Scriptures 
which recognized that the accepted versions were 
merely translations from older and more authorita- 


Nee 


tive texts in other less familiar languages. This im- 
plied a recognition of the fact that the accepted 
versions were subject to corrections which might 
alter the meaning or the significance of passages 
which the movement of the Reformation had al- 
ready made subjects of controversy. 

Violent protests were at once voiced at the Sor- 
bonne against the audacity of Robert Estienne, a 
mere lad, in issuing his highly controversial revision 
of Holy Writ, and in printing it in octavo, the un- 
dignified format of books intended for sale to the 
many. Estienne met this challenge by completing 
his textual examination of the rest of the Bible. He 
published the first of several complete editions in 
1528. The officials of the Sorbonne threatened ex- 
treme measures to suppress his activities, but the 
French Crown protected the printer, in part per- 
haps because he was doing the Court circle a real 
service by distracting the attention of the theolo- 
gians from others in high station whose opinions 
were tending away from traditional orthodoxy. 
When the controversy became more annoying, in 
1534, Francis I issued a peremptory order forbid- 
ding all printing. This produced another unexpected 
trouble, for the Parliament refused to register the 
decree. A revised order, forbidding the printing of 
new books, met the same refusal, and when the 
King accepted the situation, the first move had 
been won in the struggle for the FREEDOM OF THE 


[74 J 


Press. It was a very limited freedom according to 
modern ideas, but of fundamental importance as 
recognizing a principle. Francis I died in 1547, and 
soon afterward Robert Estienne left Paris under 
the protection of the friendly Bishop of Meaux. 

Geneva welcomed the printer who had cham- 
pioned the fundamentals of the reform movement; 
but Estienne soon found that it was easier to com- 
bat the unified hostility of his Parisian enemies 
than to make a living trying to please the highly 
individualistic groups of religious innovators who 
congregated at the centre of Calvinism. His last 
decade of unimportant work ended with his death 
in 1559. | 

A second Henri EstTIENNE, son of Robert, born 
in 1528, began collating ancient manuscripts before 
he was twenty. Primarily a hellenist, he began his 
career as a printer in 1557 at Geneva, by bringing 
out editions of five Greek authors who were virtu- 
ally inedited, which is evidence that they were au- 
thors for whose writings there was no demand. For 
the next decade he was subsidized by a cadet of the 
family of Fugger, the great Augsburg merchant 
house. In 1569 he issued a printed circular letter to 
his correspondents, explaining that his failure to an- 
swer letters was due to the fact that since 1562 he 
had been preoccupied by the task of keeping two 
presses busy printing a Greek Thesaurus compiled 
on a new method. This appeared in 1572. Before 


[75] 


there was time for any general sale, a compact 
abridgement containing all the essential novelties of 
the compendious work was put on the market by 
Fstienne’s assistant and proof-reader, Jean Scapula. 
Scapula claimed that he had urged Estienne to 
issue this himself, but the latter foresaw its inevit- 
able effect upon the larger work, and refused to do 
it. Scapula had it printed elsewhere; and the sale of 
the Thesaurus scarcely met the bills for paper. Esti- 
enne spent most of his remaining years travelling 
from fair to fair all over Europe, seeking buyers. In 
1598 he died, alone, in the city hospital at Lyons. 
His daughter married Isaac Casaubon, through 
whom the scholarly inheritance of the Estiennes 


passed to England. 


THE END OF THE MANUSCRIPT 
TRADITION 


In 1521 the first Henri Estienne died and Simon 
DE Co inEs became the widow’s most distinguished 
husband. He maintained the former prestige of the 
printing house as a resort for learned men, rivalling 
in this the Aldine “Academy” at Venice. He added 
to the fame of the press for its correct and authori- 
tative texts an even greater reputation for elegant 
typography and beautiful press-work. Its long list 
of publications already included several groups of 
books on closely related subjects. Colines developed 
these into definite series. He issued them with new 
woodcut designs for the title-pages, carefully using 
the same style for all the books in a series, so that 
they could be easily recognized by purchasers. 
Simon de Colines’s greatest contribution to the 
fame of the establishment came when he recognized 
the genius of Georroy Tory and employed him to 
design decorations for its books. Tory had been a 
professor of philosophy and the classics and a stu- 
dent of geography before he gave himself up to an 
overpowering desire to express himself artistically. 
In later years he became a printer on his own ac- 
count, a reformer of the French language, and an 
innovator in its alphabetic symbols. He brought 
about the abandonment of the traditional black- 


Rrra 


letter type in favor of the modern roman letter; he 
introduced the ¢, and gave a tremendous impetus to 
self-consciousness among the French printers, lead- 
ing them to consider their responsibility for the con- 
tents as well as the appearance of the books on 
which they put their names. 

Geofroy Tory’s claim to genius, as the greatest of 
all decorators of typography, rests upon the orna- 
ments that he designed while he was in the service 





of Colines, and subject to his directions and criti- 
cism. These consist of title-borders, printer’s marks, 
headbands and tail-pieces, and of several series of 
initial letters for use at the opening of chapters and 
of sections of the text. For perfect adaptation to 
their purpose and for unquestioned appropriateness 


[78] 


YZ i 
AN Yh 
cys ‘ & Al 


CECA) 


and effectiveness in the places for | 
which they were intended, the de- 
signs of these wood blocks have 
not been surpassed. The highest 
praise that could be paid to Bruce | 





Rogers, when Alfred W. Pollard described him as 
the finest modern bookmaker, was to style him the 
reincarnation of Tory. Tory’s designs were never 
printed as perfectly in his own time as they were in 
the Riverside Press edition of Auguste Bernard’s 
Life of Tory, produced by Rogers in 1909. 

Tory and Colines demonstrated to the Parisian 
book-buyers that a well-made, thoughtfully planned 
commercial book could be a beautiful thing. The 
standards which they set governed the ordinary 
output of the better Paris printers for the ensuing 
half-century. With less of genius but with quite as 
sound an instinct for the fundamental qualities that 
make a book good, several printers gave to their 
productions a quality which has profoundly influ- 
enced the best book-making of the twentieth cen- 
tury. The essential thing about the books that 
bear the imprint of MicueL Vascosan, RoBERT 
Granjon, Feperic Moret, and JEAN LE Rover of 
Paris, and of the JEAN DE Tournes, father and son, 
and CLaubDE Parapin of Lyons, is that they are dis- 
tinctly modern in their more important characteris- 
tics. They owe nothing to the mediaeval traditions 
of book-making. These French printers have been 
studied more comprehendingly by Daniel Berkeley 
Updike than by anyone else; to them is due no 
small part of the inspiration which makes the 
Merrymount Press preéminent. 


THE END OF THE ERA OF THE 
MASTER PRINTERS 


Tue Era of the Master Printers ended with Curis- 
TOPHE PLANTIN. Since his time there have been 
many great masters of printing establishments who 
were practical craftsmen, some of whom, like the 
two Charles Whittinghams, have profoundly influ- 
enced the development of book-making. Before 
Plantin, from the days of Koberger and of the early 
Venetians, there had been owners of printing plants 
whose business ability made them sellers rather than 
makers of books. But it was the Master, exercising 
a direct oversight of the activities of compositors, 
pressmen, and binders, who gave to the industry its 
characteristic features down to the later decades 
of the sixteenth century. After 1600 the publisher 
dominated the craftsman. 

ANTWERP, the capital of the Spanish Nether- 
lands, was supplanting Venice as the world’s ship- 
ping metropolis before 1550. The printers already 
controlled one quarter of the town, and had begun 
to rival the Italians as purveyors of books, without 
taking anything away from the older city. The 
social and economic changes of half a century had 
doomed the books — treatises on the Canon Law, 
the Church Fathers, mediaeval medical works, edi- 
tions of the ancient Classics made authoritative by 
the names of famous scholars — which were still the 


[ 81 ] 


backbone of the Venetian book trade. Instead of 
these books, which appealed to those who longed for 
culture and learning, hundreds of Antwerp work- 
men were prosperously employed in making books 
which were intended to entertain the readers. They 
were printed in every European language, in quan- 
tities as much larger than the editions of those 
other more respectable works as they are now more 
difficult to find. Rarely does the hunter through the 
old bookshops come upon an Antwerp sixteenth- 
century imprint; and when he does, he may not 
recognize it, for the title-page is apt to say that it 
was printed at Paris or Philopolis or some equally 
improbable locality. 

Christophe Plantin was a young French book- 
binder seeking his fortune when he went to Ant- 
werp in 1549. He made his way to recognition by 
the court officials, until an injury forced him to 
abandon his trade and take up the lighter physical 
labor of printing. By 1559 he had won a position 
which gave him the commission for printing the 
monumental volume containing the official record 
of the ceremonies attending the funeral of Charles 
the Fifth. This led to other similar tasks executed 
for the government, which gave him contemporary 
fame, and eventual bankruptcy. He built up a 
sound business, and prospered whenever he was 
free to attend to this. But like many another, the 
fascination of doing a grand book was more than he 


[ 82 ] 


could resist, and then as always it was impossible 
to do the monumental volume, to his own critical 
satisfaction, without exceeding the amount which 
seems proper to a layman unfamiliar with the time 
and attention imperatively demanded by a piece of 
fine printing. 

Plantin’s grandest idea became a reality through 
the assistance of Spanish ecclesiastical and court 
officials. Fifty years before, another Spaniard, Car- 
dinal Ximenes, had fostered the first Polyglott 
Bible. This had long been unprocurable by scholars, 
and Plantin proposed to issue a more adequate 
work which should include the texts of the Holy 
Scriptures in all the languages from which they are 
derived. Philip IT became interested in the idea and 
promised to subsidize it. The royal promises were 
ample to justify the venture; but the royal treas- 
urer had many other claims upon the funds in 
hand, and with the best of intentions, Philip was un- 
able to do all that he meant to. Plantin began by 
training a special staff of workmen. A Hebrew 
Grammar was printed to familiarize them with this 
language, and when he found a satisfactory proof- 
reader, he married him to a daughter, that there 
might be less danger of losing him. New fonts of 
type were ordered from Robert Granjon of Lyons 
and Claude Garamond of Paris. The initial order 
for paper called for 3000 reams, and 400 dozen 
skins were ordered for the vellum copies. 


ke 


Sample pages of the Polyglott, with the text in 
four languages, were shown at the Franckfurt book 
fair in 1566. There was talk of a rival work under 
Lutheran auspices, with the Elector of Saxony as 
patron, but it was obvious that the effort to print 
the two would be suicidal for both. It was this 
danger — that the undertaking might be contami- 
nated by Protestant influence —which helped to 
convince Philip IJ that it must be done under 
Spanish control. By midsummer of 1568 the speci- 
men sheets had received final approval, and a few 
months later the work started. Forty workmen, 
with two, and later four, presses, were kept steadily 
employed for three years. The edition was 1200 
copies, on paper of four different sizes, and thirteen 
copies on vellum for the King. The number of 
volumes in which it was bound varies from six on 
the ordinary paper to eleven for those on vellum. It 
was completed in 1572. 

Plantin’s Polyglott Bible is still unrivalled as a 
printer’s achievement. But the printer had to pay 
his workmen in order that the work might not stop, 
and when the remittances from the Spanish treas- 
ury did not arrive, he had to turn to a public- 
spirited Jewish money-lender, Louis Perez, who 
must have known how precarious was the security. 
The King endeavored to help the situation, and 
made it worse by ordering a series of large service 
books which he thought of presenting to each 


[84 ] 


church in the kingdom. This did not please the 
printers of Spain, who made their influence felt, and 
the plan was given up after Plantin had committed 
himself to further heavy expenditures. A more tan- 
gible reward was a royal grant giving him a mono- 
poly for printing the authorized service books for 
the Spanish domains. 

Plantin died in 1589, and the business passed to a 
son-in-law, Jean Moretus, who had advanced 
money to keep it going. Abandoning all other lines, 
Moretus and his successors devoted their attention 
to the monopoly of service books. The mark of the 
compass was no longer found on handsome books, 
but the profits of the establishment steadily accu- 
mulated. The business remained in the family and 
was carried on in the original Plantin house until 
1876, when the city of Antwerp and the Belgium 
government united to purchase it as a public mu- 
seum. Plantin was a sound business man in principle 
if not always in practice, keeping all of his account 
books carefully and preserving his correspondence. 
These documentary records supplement the actual 
presses, fonts of type, and cases filled with wood- 
blocks and metal cuts, with the desks of the proof- 
readers and the incidental paraphernalia of a six- 
teenth-century printing office, all together making 
this museum the most significant and instructive of 
printing meccas. 





























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